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Novecento Italiano (lit. 'Italian 1900s') was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 to create an art based on the rhetoric of the fascism of Mussolini.
Novecento Italiano was founded by Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955), Leonardo Dudreville (1885–1975), Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba (1880–1926), Pietro Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi, and Mario Sironi. [1] Motivated by a post-war "call to order", they were brought together by Lino Pesaro, a gallery owner interested in modern art, and Margherita Sarfatti, a writer and art critic who worked on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's newspaper, The People of Italy ( Il Popolo d'Italia ). Sarfatti was also Mussolini's mistress.
The movement was officially launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, with Mussolini as one of the speakers. The group was represented at the Venice Biennale of 1924 in a gallery of its own, with the exception of Oppi, who exhibited in a separate gallery. [2] Oppi's defection caused him to be ejected from the group, [3] which subsequently split and was reformed. The new Novecento Italiano staged its first group exhibition in Milan in 1926.
Several of the artists were war veterans; Sarfatti had lost a son in the war. The group wished to take on the Italian establishment and create an art associated with the rhetoric of fascism. The artists supported the fascist regime and their work became associated with the state propaganda department, although Mussolini reprimanded Sarfatti for using his name and the name of fascism to promote Novecento. [4]
The name of the movement (which means 1900s) was a deliberate reference to great periods of Italian art in the past, the Quattrocento and Cinquecento (1400s and 1500s). The group rejected European avant garde art and wished to revive the tradition of large format history painting in the classical manner. It lacked a precise artistic programme and included artists of different styles and temperament, for example, Carrà and Marini. It aimed to promote a renewed yet traditional Italian art. Sironi said, “if we look at the painters of the second half of the 19th century, we find that only the revolutionary were great and that the greatest were the most revolutionary”; the artists of Novecento Italiano “would not imitate the world created by God but would be inspired by it”.
Despite official patronage, Novecento art did not always have an easy ride in Fascist Italy. Mussolini was personally uninterested in art and divided official support among various groups so as to keep artists on the side of the regime. Opening the exhibition of Novecento art in 1923 he declared that “it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view." [5] The movement was in competition with other pro-Fascist movements, especially Futurism and the regionalist Strapaese movement. Novecento Italiano also met outright opposition. Achille Starace, the General Secretary of the Fascist Party, attacked it in the Fascist daily press and there was virulent criticism of its “un-Italian" qualities by artists and critics.
In the 1930s, a group of professors and students at the Accademia di Brera established an opposition group to Novecento Italiano. Among them was the director of the academy Aldo Carpi, and students Afro, Aldo Badoli, Aldo Bergolli, Renato Birolli, Bruno Cassinari, Cherchi, Alfredo Chighine, Grosso, Renato Guttuso, Dino Lanaro, Giuseppe Migneco, Mantica, Ennio Morlotti, Aligi Sassu, Ernesto Treccani, Italo Valenti, and Emilio Vedova (and later Giuseppe Ajmone and Ibrahim Kodra), with participation from Trento Longaretti, who wasn't involved in the foundational discussions because he returned to his hometown Treviglio by train after classes. [6] This movement became known as Corrente , which also published a magazine by that name. [6] By 1939, a famous editorial in the magazine stated the group's opposition to fascism, Novecento Italiano, and Futurism. [7]
The unity of the group depended much on Sarfatti and it weakened in her absence from Milan. When she was distanced from Mussolini, in part due to the anti-Semitic ordinances of 1938, the group fell apart and was formally disbanded in 1943.
Giacomo Matteotti was an Italian socialist politician. On 30 May 1924, he openly spoke in the Italian Parliament alleging the Fascists committed fraud in the recently held elections, and denounced the violence they used to gain votes. Eleven days later he was kidnapped and killed by Fascists.
Margherita Sarfatti was an Italian journalist, art critic, patron, collector, socialite, and prominent propaganda adviser of the National Fascist Party. She was Benito Mussolini's biographer as well as one of his mistresses.
Mario Sironi was an Italian modernist artist who was active as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer. His typically somber paintings are characterized by massive, immobile forms.
Giovanni Muzio was an Italian architect. Muzio was born and died in Milan. He was closely associated with the fascist Novecento Italiano artists group.
Mario Radice was an Italian painter born in Como. He is considered to be an important Italian abstract artist.
Italian Contemporary art refers to painting and sculpture in Italy from the early 20th century onwards.
Corrente di Vita was a biweekly Italian culture magazine published between 1938 and 1940.
Achille Funi was an Italian painter who painted in a neoclassical style.
Ugo Piatti was an Italian painter and instrument maker, best known for collaborating on the construction of the intonarumori with Luigi Russolo.
The art collections of Fondazione Cariplo are a gallery of artworks with a significant historical and artistic value owned by Fondazione Cariplo in Italy. It consists of 767 paintings, 116 sculptures, 51 objects and furnishings dating from the 1st century to the second half of the 20th century.
Sansepolcrismo is a term used to refer to the movement led by Benito Mussolini that preceded Fascism. The Sansepolcrismo takes its name from the rally organized by Mussolini at Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan on March 23, 1919, where he proclaimed the principles of Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, and then published them in Il Popolo d'Italia, on June 6, 1919, the newspaper he co-founded in November 1914 after leaving Avanti!
The Sandro Italico Mussolini School of Fascist Mysticism was established in Milan, Italy in 1930 by Niccolò Giani. Its primary goal was to train the future leaders of Italy's National Fascist Party. The school curriculum promoted Fascist mysticism based on the philosophy of Fideism, the belief that faith and reason were incompatible; Fascist mythology was to be accepted as a "metareality". In 1932, Mussolini described Fascism as "a religious concept of life", saying that Fascists formed a "spiritual community".
The Museo del Novecento is a museum of twentieth-century art in Milan, in Lombardy in northern Italy. It is housed in the Palazzo dell'Arengario, near Piazza del Duomo in the centre of the city.
The Galleria d'arte moderna Aroldo Bonzagni is an Italian museum, located in Cento. It was founded in 1959 in memory of the local painter Aroldo Bonzagni, who died in 1918 at only thirty years of age.
Achille Lega was an Italian painter. His early work was in the futurist style and he later became a cubist.
Leopoldo Longanesi was an Italian journalist, publicist, screenplayer, playwright, writer, and publisher. Longanesi is mostly known in his country for his satirical works on Italian society and people. He also founded the eponymous publishing house in Milan in 1946 and was a mentor-like figure for Indro Montanelli: journalist, historian, and founder of Il Giornale, one of Italy's biggest newspapers.
Pietro Marussig was an Italian painter.
Ubaldo Oppi was an Italian painter, one of the founders of the Novecento Italiano in Milan. He painted in a neo-quattrocento realist style.
Gian Emilio Malerba (1880–1926) was an Italian painter and illustrator, one of the founders of the Novecento Italiano in Milan. He initially created works in a Liberty or Art Nouveau style.
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